Creating your own Keyboard Shortcuts is a great way to keep your productivity high. To make a shortcut for a menu item that doesn’t already have one, you simply drop into System Preferences > Keyboard, hit the Shortcuts button at the top, and then add your shortcuts (more below). You have to add the full menu path for the shortcut to work, though, and there’s the rub.

Some apps have menu items that are named the same thing. For example, in Pages, there are two submenus named Use Default: one in the Baseline submenu, and one in the Ligature submenu. How can you tell your Mac which menu you want to activate with your new shortcut?

If you’ve used iTunes for a while now, you know how to set the Equalizer to a variety of pre-set and custom settings to make your music sound the way you want it, right? You simply head up to the Window menu, and choose Equalizer, or hit Option-Command-Two. The Equalizer window will show up, and you can click on the pop up menu at the top there to pick a setting you’re happy with.

But what if you want to set your Equalizer differently for different tracks? It’s pretty easy to do, but you’ll probably have to hop into the View options in the list view to make this work.

Here at Cult of Mac, we take quite a few screenshots. Our current favorite for taking and annotating them is Share Bucket, and of course you can always use Preview or Grab to take your screenshots, but what about the basics? Not everyone needs fancy screenshot capabilities. Aren’t the built-in tools in OS X good enough for most of us?

They sure are, and while we’ve covered a couple of them before, we haven’t just put them all in one tip to rule them all. Or something like that.

Here’s a handy little tip if you shut down your Mac with the options in the Apple Menu.

Typically, when you choose Restart or Shut Down from these menu options, you’ll get a dialog box that checks to see if you’re absolutely, positively sure you meant to choose the menu option that you just…chose…sigh.

When you’re using iTunes in list view to see all your songs listed in order, you can sort that list by the columns across the top.

If you notice, there’s a little checkbox to the left of each track. These checkboxes tell iTunes when to use the tracks or not, like when you’re ripping CDs, using the Match Only Checked Items Smart Playlist option, and when syncing to your iPhone. If you uncheck a song, it won’t be burned to a CD, added to a specific Playlist, or synced to your iPhone. To make that happen, simply click on the checkbox to the left of any track and it will be unchecked.

When you’re typing in Terminal, it’s easy to access the commands you’ve previously typed with the Up arrow on your keyboard. This can be handy when you have to re-type a long, complicated command. Simply hit the up-arrow and you’ll get the previously entered command.

Hit the up-arrow again, and you’ll get the command you entered before that, and so on, cycling through in reverse order until you get to the very first command entered in that particular Terminal window.

There are quite a few web sites these days that will send you notifications when you visit them via Safari. Sites like NBA.com and the New York Times will drop you a dialog box when you visit them for the first time to ask you if you would like to receive the push notifications.

If you allow them, all hope is not lost should you reconsider your decision. You can drop right into System Preferences and disable them on a site by site basis.